IBX News

Camden County Schools issued the following announcement on Feb 14.

This is a message the our superintendent, Dr. Joe Ferrell, sent out to our staff to clarify the information that was shared and discussed at the Commissioners Meeting last night, Monday, February 7, 2022.

County have been discussing a new high school for many years. When I arrived in November of 2017, the school district had just received a Needs-Based School Capital Funds grant in the amount of $2,287,400. At that time, the full amount of grant funds that a school district could receive was $15,000,000. After doing a little research, I quickly realized that we needed to apply for the balance at some point. We did that and received an additional $10,000,000 in November of 2019. Our total grant funds equaled $12,287,400. That amount is short of the $15,000,000 because, at that time, Camden was designated a Tier 2 county. Camden is now designated a Tier 3 county. I will not go into a lot of detail here about the Tier designation, but if you are interested, Google search "county tier designation North Carolina" and you will find a lot of information about this. 

Once we had the grant funds, we then started looking at a number of things like:

1 - How much more funding would be needed to build the school?

2 - From where would that funding come?

3 - What size school do we need?

***these are just a few examples of the types of questions we had to answer

Ultimately, the total projected cost of the new high school project was around $64,000,000. Once the county financial advisors got involved, the County Commissioners set a limit of 10 cents tax impact for the Bond Referendum. When the calculations were done, that amount of tax impact would allow for a $33,000,000 referendum. The Bond Referendum passed by over 70%. That gave us a total of $45,287,400 to build a $64,000,000 school. It was at that time that the Board of Education started making reductions. The auditorium was eliminated and designated "future". The auxiliary gym was eliminated and designated "future". Other smaller impact/less obvious items were eliminated. All of this brought the scope of the project within the $45,287,400 budget. 

Since the Bond Referendum passed in November of 2020, we have been working to get the school and school site designed and things have been progressing slowly at times and more quickly at times. While this was happening, COVID changed a lot of things in our country. There are supply chain issues, workforce issues, rising costs issues, and so on. Honestly, I became worried that we might have to put the project on hold. The issue with that, of course, is that we are out of space in all of our schools and the number of houses being built across Camden County continues to increase. 

Fast-forward to October of 2021 and the passing of the most recent state budget. That is when a new Needs-Based School Capital Funds grant program was announced. This is a very different level of grant. The maximum amount of funding jumped from $15,000,000 to $30,000,000 for an elementary school, $40,000,000 for a middle school and $50,000,000 for a high school. I emailed my contact at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to ask if Camden could apply for additional grant funding and was told yes. We immediately started working on the new grant. One of the first things we considered is how to get the most grant funding possible. It was very obvious that if we showed our project budget at $45,287,400, there would be no way we would get $50,000,000. We made the decision to add back all of the things that had been eliminated from the original estimated $64,000,000 project. Due to inflation, the professional estimators with M.B. Kahn brought us a figure of $69,636,061.This is the figure we decided to include in the grant application in hopes of getting the full $50,000,000 in grant funds because, while there is no local match required for the new round of grants, we speculate that they do want to see that we have some "skin in the game" so to speak. So, let's say we get the full $50,000,000 and the total budget for the new school is $69,636,061. The difference is $19,636,061. One option would be to bring this amount from the $33,000,000 Bond Referendum and build the full scale project. If this was the decision, there will still be less money borrowed than the original $33,000,000 which should reduce the tax impact. There are several other options/scenarios. Yes, one option would be to build a $50,000,000 school and have no further tax impact from the passing of the Bond Referendum. These decisions will be made based on how much, if any, additional grant funding we receive and many other factors. These decisions cannot be made until we know how much funding we are receiving from the new grant. These decisions will be made by the Board of Education and the County Commissioners. 

I want to be very clear that all of this information matters. Not just the $69,636,061 which is what it seems was heard loud and clear from the Commissioners meeting last night. I can't stress enough how important it is to communicate full and accurate information and not just bits and pieces of information. That is the purpose of this email and I hope you find it helpful. I am always willing to answer any questions in reference to the new high school project and will keep you informed about the new grant! Fingers crossed for the full $50,000,000.

 Original source can be found here.